Good Life Project - Mark Nepo: Inside the Miracle

Episode Date: November 23, 2015

Mark Nepo is a renowned poet, philosopher, author, master storyteller and spiritual teacher.He has appeared numerous times on Oprah, his Book of Awakening was a #1 New York Times bestseller and his newest book, Inside the Miracle, explores how we can move through suffering with grace and resilience.As Mark shares in this wide-ranging conversation, his darkest moment came in 1987, when he was diagnosed with lymphoma, which then led him into three years of treatment that eventually brought him back to health, but also pulled him through a brutal, yet awakening experience in its own right.Somehow, out of that moment, he was able to reconnect with a deeper sense of spirit and emerge not just in a different place, but a changed man.We explore all of this, as well as his lens on God, spirituality, truth, expression, relationships and so much more. And, at the end, as a special offering, he reads two beautiful poems to close the conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. Even as a child, I was just the world, the universe, God, whatever name you want to give to the bigness, the vastness, really spoke to me in metaphor.

When I was alone, I was in conversation, even as a child. You know, if the wind was rustling through the trees, the way it would lift some branches and drop others was speaking to me and showing me patterns. One of the most fundamental truths in life is that at some point we will all bump up against something profoundly challenging, potentially even threatening to our very existence. This week's guest, Mark Nepo, faced that with a cancer diagnosis that seemingly came out of nowhere. Now decades behind him, that served as a source of profound awakening. Rather than shutting down, it moved him to start to explore what happens in life that leaves us connected. How do we actually exist on the planet in a way that lights ourselves up and lights others up and finds us connected and elevated? He's since written countless books almost on poetry and philosophy. He's got a wonderful new book out called Inside the Miracle as well. I'm so excited to be able to sit down with Mark today and to share his journey, to share the many touch points and really just explore very often the questions that we actually

don't go all that deep into in life. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. I want to dance around with you a little bit. You had a moment of reckoning, a moment of awakening, a moment of liberation, or at least the seeds were planted in 1987. I want to start before that, though, because I want to go back in time a little bit.

You're a poet, you're a philosopher, a teacher. Do you have a sense for where the earliest seeds... Obviously, you have a deep fascination with language. Do you have a sense for when or earliest seeds, obviously you have a deep fascination with language. Do you have a sense for when or where the earliest seeds of that were planted? Well, so let me start before I talk about my own particular unfolding, kind of about my sense of the nature of unfolding. And, you know, I really believe that everybody has a gift, and one of our callings is to find it and then to inhabit it. So how we come to that gift can be, you know, as we'll talk about, you know, for me, cancer really dropped me into the depth of life. But it doesn't have to be catastrophe or illness.

You know, it can be anything. It can be surprise, wonder, love, you know, a loss of purpose. All of a sudden, the bottom falls out. So, you know, and my story is an example, not an instruction. And so, you know, for instance, the medieval mystic, Mechthild, female German mystic in the Middle Ages, she said beautifully this wonderful, she said, you know, a bird doesn't fall in the sky and a fish doesn't drown in water. Each creature has to find their God-given element.

And so it's easy for fish and birds, and they also don't have, at least as we know, the consciousness that we have, and it's more of a blessing and more of a challenge for us to find our God-given element. So, each of us has to find our way to our gifts and then inhabit them. So, for me, you know, before I had any language for anything or names, even as a child, I was just the world, the universe, God, whatever name you want to give to the bigness, the vastness, really spoke to me in metaphor. When I was alone, I was in conversation, even as a child. You know, if the wind was rustling through the trees, the way it would lift some branches and drop others was speaking to me and showing me patterns. And I'm Jewish and grew up with two parents who were children of the Great

Depression, immigrants, you know, children of immigrants. They were the first born here. So, you know, very grounded, very, you know, absorbed in learning. They drilled learning and questions and everything into my brother and I. But they weren't artists. My father was a, they both were very creative. But, you know, they were not into the world of depth. They were very, I think because of their, the circumstances of how they grew up, they were very nonfiction people, very literal minded, but very intelligent. And, you know, so when I would bring these things

home, you know, that the wind was speaking to me and the trees, they were like, you know, how are you going to make a living? You know, Were they, you mentioned you brought up Jewish. Were they religious? They were. Actually, my parents were atheistic, agnostic, slash deeply cultural Jews. So they get a mystical poet for a son. And I've learned my father is gone a couple of years now. He died at 93, and my mom is still alive. But I hold that differently.

It was difficult because we didn't speak the same language. And we went through a lot of estrangements and coming together and estrangements throughout life. But now I'm 64, and I think it wasn't easy for them to have. I don't think they knew what to do with me, nor I to do with them. Especially coming out of the background, not just the background, but coming out of the time in our history that they were coming out of, where the greatest desire for a parent wasn't so much finding your thing, it was safety. It was safety. And so let's, I mean, we'll follow this where it goes, you know, because there's something that's been very intriguing to me as I get older,

and that is my sense of Jewishness. You know, I'm a student of all paths. I don't follow any one religious tradition because through my, so I'll circle back to this, but through my cancer journey, you know, I was in my 30s,, I was in my 30s. I'm 64 in my 30s. I was blessed to have people from all faiths, including atheist friends. Everybody offers some kind of healing and help me to be here.

And blessed to be here, I wasn't and I'm still not wise enough to know what worked and what didn't. And so I kind of woke up challenged to believe in everything. And all my work, all my books, all my teaching, the inquiries that I am blessed to convene are all around revealing what I believe is the common center of all paths and the unique gifts of each. Even science. An atheist is someone who believes in nothing as opposed to everything. It's still larger than them. So it doesn't matter. They can say it's different from everybody else, but it's still a path.

So believing in all that and also as a cancer survivor, being very committed to, as a teacher, okay, the things that I discover through my inquiries, how do we personalize those? If something I say or open up makes sense to you, then where does it live in your life? So all of that to say that the return to the sense of Jewishness that, you know, as I get older, I just came back in September, I was in Amsterdam speaking at a festival, and that was my first time there. And I had the chance to go to the Anne Frank House, which was very powerful for me and very moving to walk on the steps that they went up every night and down that they hid and to realize that you

know i was born five six years after the holocaust you know and but for a shake of the seeds that that cast in the universe she could be sitting here talking to you and i could have been walking up those steps and died in one of the camps. And it was very, very palpable. And then to be thrust back on the streets and of course life is going on. And there's dogs waiting for their owners and there's people laughing and there's music and we, you know, I was with someone and we drift into a cafe and try to return to now. But one of the paradoxes that is so powerful to me, and then we can talk about what this says about leading a good life, but there's something inherent, I feel, in Jewishness that is rooted in standing

in truth however we find it, in standing in who we are, in not hiding who we are, in not having answers but living in questions. And from that terrible time and other persecutions throughout history, many of the Jews who survived were those who hid. You know, that's not a paradox to solve. It's just to hold. And so I have found, I have felt my Jewishness when I've been, I was also in Prague in 2009, and I have felt my Jewishness more visible and present when I'm walking in Europe than here in

America and it's been very powerful for me to be with all that and where did what you know is that all about because I feel that to be in a minority and we can name all kinds of minorities, there's a particular pain that you can't hide who you are. If you're African American or Hindu or Muslim or Native American or Asian, you know, more, you can listen. But, and no one taught me this. No one verbally talked about this as a kid to me. But somehow, in the psychic tsunami that came from the Holocaust, even across the ocean and two generations later, I realized I've always, when something would come up in conversation

or in a group or in a restaurant or with strangers, I always have the choice to say that I'm Jewish or not, which is its own particular pain, whether to declare myself or hide. And since I've been aware of this, I've chosen to be more visible. But I think that there's some kind of built-in psychic residue from the Holocaust that does talk about, that speaks. And like I said, nobody talked to me. My parents didn't sit down and say, hey, you're Jewish and you're two generations down from this terrible thing. Be careful.

Nobody said that. I just somehow knew as I would run into anti-Semitism in grade school or in high school. It's interesting. I had a similar experience. I was speaking in Munich a couple of years back, first time there. Didn't know much about the city. Learned a lot about the city now because it was really the seat of the Third Reich. At one point during the afternoon, I i said you know i'm here i said there's

something that i feel like i i'm called to have to do even though i actually didn't want to do it which was get on the train out to dachau and actually spend the day moving through that camp and um there was you know it's not something that's a part of my daily experience, that sense of connectedness, but there was a moment where they were telling about who was in this camp. And the people that were there were middle class families. And that was the moment where something just poured through me and said, there but for God's grace, go I. And I was like this, and I just, I was, I can't even explain the emotion that swept through me at that time. And I just walked the rest of the gates and were in the midst of this beautiful middle-class suburb with cafes and vibrance and people. And it struck me on two levels. One, because

the profound contrast, but two, because my mind goes back to when this was actually happening, this was like, it was like the fence between two yards. Yes. And you start to ask all sorts of questions, which, you know, you don't want to ask. Yeah. But it's interesting because I had a similar sort of experience as somebody. I was raised Jewish also, but very, you know, non-practicing.

You know, like H.E. Jacobs has a great line. He's like, you know, like, I'm Jewish the way that Olive Garden is Italian. And it was just pretty much, you know, like my upbringing. And, you know, probably similarly, I think I explore the world in a spiritual way and have a very strong sense of that. But I felt more connected to that specific faith in that moment than maybe at any other time in my life. Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.

So let me make one other reference to that and then try to bring to another example of what I think this has surfaced a learning for me. But I just had a very dear friend and mentor who died in the last few days. He was 102. Joel Elkies, who was a child of the Holocaust. He was a medical doctor who was one of the fathers of psychopharmacology in the 50s and a painter. And, you know, he, about 10 years or so ago, he gave me a book by Heschel, Abraham Heschel, called The Earth is the Lord's Prayer. And it's a very thin book, but what Heschel does in this book is he describes for posterity the Eastern European Jewish mind, because he knew from the Holocaust that that was vanishing. So here I am, like you, you know, I'm raised as a

cultural Jew, but not really practicing. And I've really kind of discovered my way as an artist and a thinker and a teacher and a writer and finding my own way, not really feeling connected to any tribe in particular, except everything. And I read this book in my early 50s, and if it isn't how my mind works. So I go all that way, discovering for myself that I do belong to some tribe. So it's a very dialogic tribe. It's a tribe that looks at the whole but connects with the part. It's very relational. It welcomes all voices.

There's no one answer. I even found that in the mystical Jewish tradition, the Torah, which doesn't have vowels, right? So, you know, that makes it harder to read. And in the mystical tradition, it's suggested that that's intentional so that no one can have one reading. So that everyone who comes to it will have a different reading, and we're going to have to discuss it to arrive at any meaning. I love that. I love that. That's how I've always convened circles. How does that happen? Right?

And can we go back to Mechthild. Each creature has to find their God-given element, which we find through the courage to meet the life of experience, which is the beginning of talking about how to live a good life. You know, a fish has to live in water. A human being has to live in the river of experience. Yes, is it difficult? Yes, is it challenging?

Are there times we want to say, oh, I want out? Yes, but we can't have out. And I think that whatever is larger than us that designed life, and I don't mean somebody in a gray white beard, but just the mystical order of things has made life just difficult enough that we need each other to ensure the journey of love so let me talk about a different kind of you know of like walking through that gate and realizing oh my god but for the grace of god so in my cancer journey you know, I've had so many people,

fellow cancer patients that I've traveled with who have died and who are still here and, you know. And the first thing to note is that being in those rooms, whatever those rooms are, support rooms, waiting rooms, treatment rooms, hospitals, you know, all of the ways we think we have to move in order to know somebody just evaporate. Some of the people I've been closest to through that journey, I don't even know their last

names. I don't know where they're from. I don't know what they do, where they live, but I know their souls and they know mine because all of a sudden when things matter, you sit down and you say, how did we get here? Are you okay? Can I help? I'm afraid and I'm in pain, but I know I can tell you are too. What do we do? And there's instant compassion and companionship so one of the lessons to extrapolate about living a good life is that a lot of the layers we think are necessary for a real connection they're layers of our own making yeah it's obscurity rather than clarity

when we come down to it all we have to do is have the courage to drop all the things and just reach out to each other. So I was about six or seven years out from the heat of my cancer journey, and now it's been 28 years. But I was going for a checkup, an annual checkup, nervous, saying, I feel okay, but that's how this all started. You know, I walked into a door one day and somebody said, oh, no, no, wait, wait, wait, you can't, you're not going anywhere. And then the door to what was my quote, normal life, there was no door back. It was gone. And so, you know, that's part of the post-traumatic stress is you walk into a building for a checkup. I go for an ordinary checkup. I feel fine.

I'm healthy. I'm healthier now than I was in my 30s. And all of a sudden, you know, well, yeah, but that's how it all started. What if I walk in here and somebody says, oh, no, no, no, you're not going back out there. So I walk in for this checkup, six or seven years out, nervous, sitting with other people in various stages. And I walk in. I'm fine. My doctor says I'm okay.

I start to release and go out, get into the waiting room, headed out to that door, just like that door in Munich, right, between the camp and the rest of the world. And I'm just about to walk through the door, and a woman in the waiting room collapses. And there's a code red, and everybody rushes and brings her away. And I don't know if she died or what happened or if she was okay. But everything, everybody left, and there I am standing with the door back out to the rest of life, saying, but for a hiccup of God, they'd be taking me and she'd be walking out.

And then how do you walk back out? How do you walk back out? And I don't think we can walk back out? How do you walk back out? And I don't think we can walk back out without the awareness. So this leads to the part for me of living a good life is the commitment to having our heart open to the whole of life, W-H-O-L-E. And one of the teachers for me in the last several years has been this notion that all things are true. All things aren't fair, all things aren't just, but all things contain truth.

And while we're taught from an early age with this, our mind, this amazing tool, we're taught to sort and prioritize and analyze and discern and then choose in order to survive, in order to know I need to fill the car up with gas or I need to take this medicine and not that one. That's wonderful. It's a skill.

It's not a code to live by. We elevate the skills of our mind often to codes to live by, and I think that gets us into a lot of trouble. And I find that what life has been teaching me is in order to thrive, which we have to survive and thrive, and surviving is one thing. But if all we do is survive without thriving, what's the point? And if we commit ourselves to thriving without paying attention to surviving, we won't survive. So what I have found life has been teaching me and asking me is not to sort and discern and prioritize and select, but to open my heart and absorb and

integrate, to let everything in. Yes, the Jews who survived hid, and yet part of the Jewish heritage is you don't hide, you stand in who you are. You know, that woman collapsed in the waiting room and I got to walk out. So I walk out grateful, but I never forget. And not just, but to let everything heal and resonate so that when we let it into our heart, that deeper logic of spirit starts to release a different kind of knowing so here's what's coming up for me when you offer that and it resonates really powerfully at the same time there's a sense that i think and i'm gonna speak in part on you know for me in part on what i think some people who'll be listening to this might might be coming up for them because

i've had these conversations with so many of them, is that to stand with a fully open heart, to let it all in, to say this too, at some point can become unbearable. You know, that to have, to come from a place of such profound empathy that you feel the suffering of the world as every other person who's suffering feels it and then you choose to let it in can feel like a crushing burden yeah so let's so that's wonderful to to go there so let's talk about this because this opens up another paradox

you know so on one level in the survival level we i'm not suggesting that we stay open and never close biologically psychically everything is is rhythm our eyes are opening and closing as we're talking we're inhaling we're exhaling i'm using my hands they're expanding contracting and so to the heart the heart and mind open and the way a fish, the gills open and close. So in order to move through the world, there is a rhythm of opening and closing. So I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting, and what I've learned and what's been teaching me is that the way the sun never stops shining,

and it emanates warmth and light in all directions without preference, that under the mechanisms by which we move in the world, what is the basic position that we hold? What is our basic vow about living a good life, a whole life, a full life? So if I meet you and you're unkind to me, then yes, I have to discern, is it safe? And even if it is safe, do I let you in? You have not earned the right to my sacred space. That is still, that's a negotiating skill that's necessary in good relationship. But what we often do is if you hurt me, I turn off my light, which is different than saying, no, you don't have the right to go here.

So how do we never stop emanating? Because the heart is our inner sun. Take me deeper into what you mean by I turn off my light. Well, in other words, so often what I do, if I'm at a party and there's someone who, you know, we're in a vulnerable conversation and then someone is sarcastic or hurtful or disregarding and I shut down, I shut down, which is different than saying I stopped sharing because that person doesn't deserve to be in this space anymore. So that's different than saying because I felt the hurt of that sarcasm or that hurtfulness or that disregard, I now to protect myself, muffle my light, I close it down. That's different than deciding to open and close. So I'm talking about that there is a basic position. Another deep, deep, powerful example

of this notion comes from my cancer journey, which is a very profound moment that keeps teaching me. And that was during my first chemo treatment, which was two weeks after I had a rib removed in my back. It was horribly botched. I was here in New York and I was not prepared for the fact that I would probably get sick from the chemo and vomit. Now, also, I had a rib removed, so I was very sore. And I was in a Holiday Inn with my former wife and a dear old friend, just the three of us, and I started to get sick. And the only medicine I was given was oral, so I couldn't keep it down. So we didn't know, and eventually we did go to the emergency room,

but we thought, oh, well, this can't keep happening. So we said, well, and then it would happen again, and then it would happen again. So finally, about 4 or 5 in the morning, I'm exhausted. I started to cough up blood. And then, of course, we did go to the emergency room. But before we did, I was sitting on the floor with my hands on my knees, and my former wife, in her pain and fear, desperation, she just angrily said, where is God? Where is God? And I don't know where it came from in me. I could barely talk. I was exhausted.

And I looked at her and I said, here, right here. And I think I've spent many of these years trying to understand and inquire into what came through me in that moment. But one of the things that I understand, which relates to what we were just talking about, is that to be broken is no reason to see all things as broken. That yes, I was broken. I was scared. I didn't know what was happening next, if I would make it.

And yet, somehow, I was also aware the sun was coming up. And somewhere in a neighboring town, a child was being born. And somewhere else, very close by, somebody was waking up and a couple was making love. And the birds were singing. And all of that was true. To realize that all the miracle keeps happening doesn't minimize what I was going through. You know, we tend to go and say, oh, so what you're going through doesn't matter. No. But we also tend, understandably, in our pain, to make our pain to describe the whole world, the nature of the whole world. Well, no, the whole world wasn't broken because I was slouched on that floor on a holiday inn. It took me a long time to understand this, but what I felt in that moment was the wholeness of everything. So one of the things that I've been learning recently is this paradox about the heart. The heart, I believe, is the strongest muscle we have.

It is unbreakable, even though it breaks. It is indestructible, even though when it's most sensitive in joy or pain, it feels unbearable. Actually, when things feel that sensitive and unbearable, we know the heart is at its strongest. But the faith, not faith in a creed or a code or a principle, but faith in the very pulse, the force of life, is that the heart always reforms. So I can say to you that, at least so far, I'm 64, and there's a constellation of times in my life that my heart's been shattered.

Life as I've understood it is broken apart. And in each of those times, I have felt it's unbearable. I don't know that I'll ever be able to be put back together. But I can tell you now, so far, it may change the next time it happens, so far, every single time, not only has my heart been put back together, but not the way I imagined, not with any of the maps that were torn up of life as I knew it, but so far, not only was my heart put back together, but each time it's been stronger,

bigger, gentler, and more loving for it. So, how do I phrase this? Why you and not others? Why me? Yeah, we've all been through moments in life where we were broken where our hearts are

broken yeah so many the response to that is not for it to be put back together more loving well so let me rephrase the question and because i don't think there's anything special about me you know i'm no different than anybody else. I've just been broken down at times beyond my reflex or will to run away from it, and therefore have been exposed to deeper

truths. I'd like to say it was some wisdom on my part, but it's not. That's what I was inartfully asked, but the bigger question is, what can everybody learn? So let's look at it this way. I think the thing that I've learned, and let me also say that as we're talking about all these things, it doesn't matter how much we know, I'm still not exempt from all these things. I can walk out of here, you know, today after we talk and, right, just fall down, and it doesn't exempt us from the human, messy, magnificent human journey.

And that's where the miracle, I think our element, to go back to Mechdild and that God-given element, is our incarnation as humans. Rather than finding heaven on earth, we're asked to release heaven by inhabiting our human journey on earth. So I think one of the things that affects all of us and why we sometimes we cramp up is that this process of being human, it never stops. And so we never stop forming or opening and closing or evolving and devolving and having the heart reform and going through feeling unbreakable and then things are unbearable. But it's very understandable that in trying to make sense of life, at times we try to freeze one part of that cycle. So when we're in fear, because fear and pain and worry, the way they introduce themselves is to be all-consuming. I stub my toe like when you think you might have broken it. In that moment, that's everything. Even though life hasn't stopped happening,

everything is the pain in that toe. And then after a while, it subsides and starts to throb. And now I realize, oh, okay, the sun is still shining. It didn't stop, but it still hurts. And now we have choices about how we take this in. But often in our fear and our want to try to make sense of things, we want to say, so if the cycle of life keeps going from, and actually in the Hindu tradition, there's a trinity of uh brahma vishnu and shiva and that really beautifully says it is the cycle that there's the creative force sustaining and the destroyer and then it enters form which is vishnu and then it it leaves form which is shiva which is really called the transformer but if you're the form being dissolved, they call it the destroyer. But okay, so that, but if you focus, if you want to say, okay, I can't deal with when things fall apart, that part of life.

We have a whole tradition of people who want to transcend out of here. Who want to fix on it and say, no, no, life isn't the breaking apart. It's the pure, it's the romantic, it's the transcendent. And then we have the other, the folks who, you know, because of their pain, and this is without judgment on anybody, who want to stop the wheel of life and say, no, no, no. This is it, okay? It's when things break apart. And now we have nihilists and existentialists and pragmatists and people who want to, and pessimists.

And yes, and it's not either or. It's all of it. And I think that a lot of our pain understandably comes from when we try out of our fear and worry and pain, to freeze the wheel of life. So one of the great lessons about the Buddhist notion of impermanence, which we take, of course, to say, oh, it means we're all going to die, and we will. But within living, the notion of impermanence is a blessing because nothing stays the same, including our pain and our fear. If we let it evolve, if we let it continue, of course, we being human, we have a beautiful moment. This is a great conversation.

We don't want it to end, but it will. And if it's painful, if I'm going through pain and fear, I don't want to stay afraid. I don't want to to end, but it will. And if it's painful, if I'm going through pain and fear, I don't want to stay afraid. I don't want to stay in pain. But when I try to free, when in my worry, I freeze that. And I learned this during my cancer journey. You know, I was not experienced at deep fear in my thirties or a deep pain. And when I started to encounter those things, you know, terror I discovered was the fear that this moment of pain, I would freeze and this is the way life would be forever. Forever. But then with the help of others or just through pure exhaustion, the wheel of life continues. I mean, it's interesting that it's the experience that's been shared with me by a number of people who I've known close in my life who've been through really deep depressions. And I never understood this until I was sort of by their side,

that there's the pain of being in it, but there's what seems, at least from the outside looking in, to be the deeper pain of no longer believing that things will ever be different. That's where the despair is. As you're sort of talking about the idea of impermanence and freezing, my sense is that so many of us go through life, and me included, and I've spent a fair amount of time sort of exploring Buddhism and practices and teachings, we prefer to cherry pick rather than saying, yes, everything is impermanent and there's a certain grace in that.

And let me be with that. You know, like this too, yes, and. Well, this, yeah. We want to say, I'm good with the fact that this is impermanent, but can we just freeze this? Well, and it's so, and again, this opens up compassion without judgment because we all do it. It's understandable. You know, I'm 64.

I hope to live a lot longer, and I just lost this 102-year-old mentor. So, of course, it brings up my own mortality. You know, life's wonderful. Who wants the days to keep, you know, there's a great story about Moses to supposedly, mythically live to 120 and he was involved and he was doing things and then God tapped him on

the shoulder and Moses turned around and said, so soon? Yeah. But, you know, this notion of cherry picking raises, and I think this is also a lesson that I've been learning over the years, that so much comes, we're initiated into the art of acceptance, which doesn't mean that we're passive or we resign or we don't participate. But I really feel that we, I mean, physically, if you were to all of a sudden fall down, I could help you up or I could bring you water or I can feed you. But in all the intangible ways that matter, what we go through, the only thing we have control over is our absence or our presence we really control nothing and so at a very you know from actually way back you can find i found

in an assyrian text thousands of years ago you know there was people wanting to cherry pick the good and take out the difficult. And even then, even then, and you can't do it because it's the whole of life that is healing and renewing. And as soon as you try to separate it out, it loses its resilience and potency. So a good example is like water. We know it's hydrogen and oxygen. But if I ask you, oh, I'd like the hydrogen only, even if you could separate it out, it no longer be water and it wouldn't be quenching. So I have to drink it all and somehow take in what's nourishing, because what's nourishing right-sizes what's painful.

I think one of the ways the initiations into acceptance is that everyone, everyone is given an argument with life. It can be different, but everybody has, you know, somebody might have the argument that, oh, I can control life. I want things the way I want them. Or this is unfair and therefore the world is unjust. Or I worked really hard and I didn't get what I wanted. You know, there is no God. Whatever it is, whatever or someone I love didn't love me back. And that's not to minimize the disappointments in life, but everyone is given an argument to work with. I believe it's our initiation into the needed art of acceptance and accepting this indescribable mystery that we walk in, because that makes a difference in how we do participate.

So an example, recent, maybe five years ago, which actually went back to the chemo I had, but I had a very difficult, I'm fine, but I had a medical condition that was a result of the chemo I had all those years ago because I got a very severe stomach flu. And in most people, your stomach recovers. Well, mine didn't because of the chemo I had gave me neuropathy. And so my stomach didn't recover.

So my stomach was like a backed-up sink. And this condition, which again, now compassion for other people, no one knew if it would be chronic or it would heal. And it took seven months to heal. I lost a lot of weight. But in this condition, it became very difficult to eat because it was unclear whether you could take one or two bites of cottage cheese, but if you took three, you'd have a pain, a really very painful attack. So where we live, we have all these bird feeders that my wife has put out, and in the summer, the Baltimore Orioles come only two days a year. And there they were.

And I didn't want to miss them, and I went to the window to watch the Orioles, and I got one of these attacks. And there we are. There we are. I couldn't deny the pain, but I didn't want to miss the Orioles. So I couldn't drown in my pain, but I couldn't minimize or dismiss or deny my pain either. So I was forced to let beauty in while I was suffering. Not just because it was beautiful, but because the beauty is part of the medicine.

And so it didn't eliminate my pain, but it right-sized my pain. It's interesting. It resonates really powerfully with me. right-sized my pain. It's interesting. It resonates really powerfully with me. One of the things that I've been exploring lately is the relationship between attention and experience. And the reason that story just brought it up is because I was recently invited to participate somewhere

where I had to be at my best. We were recording. And I woke up that morning with a horrendous headache. It was actually the third day, actually, now that I think about it. This was like, this is the type of, it's very unusual for me, but there it was, and I knew I had to let it go. But I also knew in my past, and I experienced it again that day, that when I showed up and I stepped into the studio for the next hour,

it didn't exist. The moment I stepped into the studio for the next hour, it didn't exist. The moment I stepped back on the elevator to go home, it was there again. So there is the pain existing. And the question in my head was, did the pain, the circumstances that caused the pain were still there the whole time. But for some reason, my brain stopped experiencing it as pain while my attention was focused on something joyful and engaging. Does that mean that I was just distracted from the pain that was there?

Or does that mean that because my attention was otherwise focused, there was no pain? Let me, because I've had experiences like that, and how I understand that, so let me speak to that a little bit, thank you for sharing that, is that I think, I don't think we can, quote, distract ourselves or run from our pain, but what I think we do, two things. One is, when we do

turn to what we love, when we turn to what brings us alive, it right-sizes the pain. It doesn't eliminate it, but it merges. When I was saying all things are true and letting things in, it merges with the pain, and it doesn't allow the pain. It allows the pain to be in us rather than us in the pain. And the second thing, and this bears telling this old Hindu teaching story,

is the second is that when in pain, one of the only things we can do is to enlarge our sense of things. Because when we remain small, the acuteness of our pain takes over. So there's this wonderful old anonymous story about a master and apprentice. There's always a master and apprentice. There's always a master and apprentice. And the master, he tells his apprentice, who's very annoying because he's always complaining about life. So he says to his apprentice, I want you to get a handful of salt and put it in a glass of water and bring it to me quietly. So the apprentice brings it and he says, the master says, drink from the glass. And he does and he spits out the water. Master says, what's the matter? Apprentice says, it's bitter. Master

says, I want you to get the same exact handful of salt and carry it and follow me quietly. So he follows the master who leads him to a lake and he says put the salt in the lake he says now drink from the lake and he drinks and it dribbles down his chin he says well he says oh it's fresh and the master looks at the apprentice he says stop being a glass become a lake stop being a glass become a lake, we can't always do that, because the nature of pain and fear makes us become a glass, but we don't have to stay a glass. Pain, I think, by default is focusing rather than expanding,

and if we could take the other lens. But what I mean, a very deliberate choice and not easy to make in the moment. Well, I think this is our commitment. And this is the real, I think, kind of applied spirituality. And we want to talk about how to live a good life is that when we close down, which we will, the commitment to open when we're closed. The commitment to get up when we're closed, the commitment to get up when we're down, the commitment to believe in everything that's not us when we're diminished, the commitment to believe that there's always more that we don't understand. And that that is actually the comfort of the mystery.

That was you on the floor in the room saying God is here. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, one of the greatest teachers about faith for me was coming upon a baby duck in a lake. And it was curled up in itself, asleep. And I said, I don't think I've ever seen anything as trusting as this little dock floating out there and it made me think about when we learn how to swim you know however who however that happens whether it's fresh water or salt water initially we start to sink we feel ourselves go into the

water and we all fight it and some adult says don you're fighting it, it's going to make it worse. But what happens is if we let ourselves sink just a little, then the buoyancy of the water holds us up, and now we can swim. And no matter what we go through in life, because the surface of the water of life is always disturbed by the weather of circumstance. We start to sink. And faith, again, not in creeds or positions or views, but faith in life. The mystical buoyancy of existence will hold us up. And those two inches might be the most difficult two inches to travel in the world.

I feel like we're taught the exact opposite from birth. What's the first thing that's done to a newborn child? They're swaddled. Yeah. Right? Because, you know, because the feeling of safety comes from being wrapped tightly. And it feels like we move through the rest of our lives trying to find out how to stay swaddled. Yeah. Because we don't want to lose that feeling. Well, and I think that we learn, or at least my experience is, little by little we start

to learn that we are swaddled by the universe. That it doesn't have to be tight. It doesn't have to be tight. Yeah. You've shared a number of stories and anecdotes, teaching stories where there was a master and a student. At this point in your life, at this point in your career, at this point you travel around the world teaching. I've no doubt that many people would look to you and say you are the master. How does that land with you? Oh, it's, you know, I'm honored, but it's not, you know,

no, that's not, I don't consider myself that way. And I think that, you know, I've been on a journey and I'm trying to learn the most out of what I've been given. And again, as an example, not as an instruction. And I think that when people, one of the things I've learned, I've been blessed and I don't, you know, because like when that woman fell in that waiting room and I was able to go out. So my understanding of being recognized or not is in the same way. We all know it doesn't have to be this way. We know there are just so many amazing spirits and artists and writers in history. We can give countless examples and some were known in their lifetime and some weren't. Warren, you know, and so being blessed to at this point to have people resonate with my work, I've started to understand that

if I do my job, which is speak authentically from my center, if I go deep enough into me, I find you. So when I touch the bottom of what I'm given and what I feel, the bottom of my personality, I start to dip into the well of all personality. And that's where we meet. So when people respond, I feel like they're really responding to their own possibility. And that I honor, I thank them, and I then try to give it back. To say it's really about what we were opening to get. It's really about whatever, where we touched. It's not about me. You know, I mean, D.H. Lawrence has a wonderful...

I mean, I don't also... I've worked really hard. I contribute. But D.H. Lawrence has a line in a poem that says, Not I, but the wind that blows through me. I love that. I think it's a nice place to come full circle. So the name of this is Good Life Project.

So I feel like we've been answering this question or playing with it the entire conversation, but if I offer the term to you, to live a good life, what comes up? Well, I think that what comes up is that to live an authentic life, an inhabited life, to work with what we're given? Because I think that if I'm authentic, I will probably be good. If I work to be good, I may not be authentic. So an authentic comes from the Greek word authentes, which means the mark of the hands. So to me, to live an authentic life, which leads to a good life, is an inhabited life, an embodied life. It means a commitment to continue to thin

whatever is between the inner life and the outer life. And I think there's two ways that happens. We willfully wear down what's between inner and outer, and we're broken open. And usually it's both. Usually it's both, but not to shy away. You know, often when we're broken open, we want to quickly cover it over the break.

But as the Tibetans say, there's always a crack in a spiritual warrior's heart because that's how the mysteries get in. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome. You feel good with that?

Yeah, that's great. Maybe just to read one poem. Oh, that would be wonderful, actually. Yeah, so let me read two, okay? Yeah, that sounds great. So this is really, you know, this was on kind of the 20th anniversary of the tumor vanishing from my head. And it's called Thrown Back. And it speaks to what we've been talking about.

And it's in the new book. 20 years ago today, the tumor growing in my skull vanished and I was thrown back in the streets like Lazarus. Today, the rain is a fine mist and I open my face for a long time, receiving water from the sky. All I can say is perhaps falling in love with the world is the bravest thing we can do. I only know that my heart grows stronger every year, a muscle gaining each time I love. And this rush of life is all we have. And still, as we struggle, we struggle to get out of it. Like a fish, we labor to make it to the

sand as if that shore were heaven. And when thrown back, we can grow bitter if we think we've failed, or be humbled to accept that waking tomorrow in all of this is being saved. And this is the final poem in the book, called The Sway of It All. And so I lift my face from the mud, the mud of my past, the mud of history, the thick and ragged bark of how we think everyone but our own darkness is the enemy. I lift my face like a worn planet spinning on itself to get back into the light to say to no one, to everyone, it is an honor to be alive. Beautiful. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. This was wonderful to explore together. Yeah. to today's episode. If you found something valuable, entertaining, engaging, or just plain fun, I'd be so appreciative if you take a couple extra seconds and share it. Maybe you want to email it to a friend, maybe you want to share it around social media, or even be awesome if you

head over to iTunes and just give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.